 This is a Wegster CNC desktop milling machine. You can make printed circuit boards with it. It came in this lightweight wooden crate. Let's open it up. This thing comes very well packed. Under the foam padding are the instructions. These came in check, which is the native language of the people who made the Wegster and English, and you can get it in different languages as well. Here I'm ordering the Robrobot to empty the packing peanuts out of the box. This box contains the power adapter and various tools. One of the tools is an auto leveling tool, which is a really nice feature on this mill. We also get some mineral oil, and they also included an eye loop, which is nice, and some starter tools, an end mill, a drill, an engraver. This box contains the printed circuit board starter kit. There is a roll of plastic, which I believe is for solder mask, and here is the green solder mask. We also get a set of drills from 0.2 to 1.1 millimeter in 0.1 millimeter increments. We also get some double-sided printed circuit boards, as well as some copper foil sheets. I'm not really sure what they're going to be used for though. And here are some more end mills and engraving bits. Robrobot, activate. Undoing this strap took a little bit of effort, but press it said and press I did, and now to remove the protective cocoon. The spindle is rotated 90 degrees for shipment, so we need to remove these two screws, and that detaches the spindle from the body, and there's a little spacer that we can just throw away. After rotating the spindle 90 degrees, we can reattach it using the original two screws, and there are also two screws on the bottom that you need to attach. Getting all the screws in place and tightening them up took quite a bit of effort, but it's well worth it in the end because that contributes to the stability of the machine. Now you might have a bit of trouble getting to the screws, especially the bottom screws, but you can move the spindle up and down manually using the knob attached to the motor. Once that's done, we can just plug in the motor cable. Now, Wegster did include a thumb drive which contains the driving software for the machine, but I figured since it's available on their website anyway, I may as well just download it and get the latest version. Now we can just plug in the power cord and release the emergency stop, and then turn the power on. Then we just press the start button and the blue LED starts blinking. Now we can attach the USB cable to the computer and start up the software. The connection status turns green when the machine is detected, and now we can manually jog the machine around in all the axes, and we can also hit the go home button, which will return all the axes to zero. Inserting a tool into the spindle requires loosening this grub screw. Then you just insert the tool and tighten up the grub screw. Don't work down on the grub screw so much because that could actually damage the spindle. All the tools have a shank of 1 eighth of an inch. There are four small work holding clamps on the XY table that are used to hold your material down. So it's important that when you create your G-code file, you position the origin so that the tool isn't going to run into any of the clamps, and of course also making sure that the entire extent of the movement is not going to run into the clamps either. The machine comes with an electronic auto-leveling system. So basically you apply this sensor cable to the tool and then to the workpiece, which of course needs to be metal. Then you can just jog the Z-axis down and the Z-axis will automatically stop when it detects continuity between the tool and the workpiece. I wanted to see if there was any wobble in the tool holder and the spindle and the tool itself. So I used this dial indicator and touched it to the spindle and rotated it in order to see what the wobble was like. And it turned out to be about a thou, which is one thousandth of an inch or 0.0254 millimeters, which is pretty good. Now the software has a really neat feature which allows it to measure the material at various points along a grid once you load the G-code and it will automatically compensate for variations in the top surface of the material. Time to try a cut. This went 0.05 millimeters into the material. This next cut uses an engraving bit for the same type of cut. Okay, let's see how thin of a line that actually made. Under my inspection microscope, I measured this to be about 0.15 millimeters or just a little bit under 8 mils, which is really good. Okay, so now I need to make a printed circuit board. So in KiCat, I just sketched up this simple SOIC to DIP adapter. So then I just routed the 16 traces. And in routing, I set the clearance and trace width to 8 mils, which is okay. And I also noticed that the holes for the DIP footprint were 0.8 millimeters. So this fits perfectly with the drill set that I received. Next, I downloaded Flatcam, which takes the Gerber and drill files from your printed circuit board and can create isolation routing G-code and drill G-code and whatever other G-code you might need to cut the board out. I found it a little difficult to use, but then again, it is open source and free, so I can't really complain. I did find that I had to place my printed circuit board layout at the 00 point as the origin. Otherwise, I would not be able to place the board in the right place. And how to use Flatcam is way beyond the scope of this video. Long story short, import all the files, generate all the paths, and set up the tool diameters and generate the G-code. So the interesting thing is that when setting up auto-leveling with a G-code file, the thing actually goes through the G-code paths and looks for the Z-depths at various points. And I think the grid size tells it how far apart the points need to be. So of course, it's not going to check every single point along each path. And this gets to be pretty important because of course, when you're cutting this out, if the surface has a variation of even 0.1 millimeters, that could be the difference between cutting and not cutting. So here's where that bottle of mineral oil comes in. It's apparently to both act as a lubricant and reduce the amount of dust and chips that go all over the place. So now that the isolation routing is done, the next thing that we're going to do is drill the holes. Now, normally I would think that you would want to drill the holes first because if you don't, then you've got these thin pieces of copper stuck to the board and then when you stick the drill in and twist it around at a really high rate, I would have expected the copper to just come right off. But apparently that's not what happened, which is interesting. It fits. And finally, we're going to cut the board out. Now there are going to be gaps in the line because of course, if you just cut the board out completely, it'll fly up and then, you know, disappear or damage stuff. And then afterwards, we can just cut it out with like a saw or a dremel or something and shave the tabs down. And now there's nothing else to do except cut the board out. This is one of my earlier attempts, and at first glance, everything looks pretty good. The thing you have to watch out for, though, are shavings like these. If you don't clean these away, they could break loose and cause shorts. So I think that a stiff brush rubbed against this thing can just get rid of all those bits. And there's the final product. It's not bad. I shouldn't have used a double layer PCB because now I need to scrape the copper off the bottom because I haven't flipped the thing over and cut out the other side, which is a whole other batch of complications that I really don't want to get into right now because I haven't done it and it's going to be hard. So after hitting that like button, you might ask me, do I recommend this? Well, it's not exactly entry level. It's just under $4,000. And there are a lot of things that can go wrong with all the different operations that you have to do. In the end, it might be convenient to get a PCB within about a day and not have to wait two weeks to have it come from China. So if you want to have really fast turnaround prototyping, this is probably great for very small boards. For larger boards, you probably want to wait and get it done right. So it all comes down to that old equation, speed versus time. Thanks for watching.